Tag: dreaming

lump

of clay

You go around putting on the necessary faces at the appropriate times, hiding the other mess in the back spaces of any given place or moment. In conversation you might allude in an offhand manner to the messes waiting in the wings but you know not to break certain taboos. One of these being an admission that you live entirely in the wings, just flying around in the shadows keeping company with the discarded stuff that has always been your kind. 

Then you are going about the motions of your seemingly appropriate life and then there is this urgent material flopping over and beyond the edges of every shut closet door, every drawer. One day, during a vigorous cleaning, you decide to collect the stuff. You throw out lots of things, but this stuff is something else, you set it aside. It waits, being regularly looked at, appearing to pose a question about handling. 

Yes, you tell it. Yes. I hear you.  Maybe it hears you, maybe not. You touch it. It holds the indent of your finger. It holds space, a malleable and formless lump. One moment it is magnificent in its strangeness, luminous in soft light, and another moment it looks like something a dog left on the sidewalk, and you wonder who does this?

One day, you pose  a series of related partial questions to the lump. Will you? And pull. Reveal to me? Knead. Something? And you spend time just holding the cool, lumpy mass of it in a hand, warming. 

Its formlessness is part of the appeal, and so is its willingness to bend to any form but precisely.

You handle it. Set it down. It now has a spot on the bedside table, beside the lamp, the pile of books, the coffee cup. The cat approaches, sniffs it, turns, sits beside the lump, then moves away.

Will you? You ask the lump. Show me? You mean your whole life but are embarrassed to say this aloud. You are not yet ready to admit to yourself what you are hearing when the lump whispers back.

You are sleeping, dreaming, or otherwise away when it talks. The cat, who listens with more experience and a more advanced sense of time and purpose,  gives you a pointed look when you return. You carry on, leaving, prodding, kneading, arranging, and setting it down. Then you sleep. 

Here I am, the lump whispers while you dream. Your whole life.

Not Enough Dream

Holding on to dreams, holding on in a dream, and the question of how we are dreaming.

I used to have a friend who would ask, in all seriousness,

How are you dreaming? like that was something anybody

necessarily did. Like being made to dream meant you could.

It felt like he was asking after a dead friend.

I envied the time he had for these questions.

If not for the alarms, I might have had better answers. 

If not for the constant interruptions to the dreams I meant to live inside, 

I might have had better answers.  Not enough, I would say, 

but I remember one now.

In the dream there are two small eggs in a nest in one hand.

The other hand holds on tight to a bar above a narrow ledge.

Toes curling, too; I wait on that ledge between What and Never.

What and what? Who knows,

––eggs, nest, birds. Some imminent fall or drop implied,

I hold on. What’s next, death? An eagle? Rescue?

I wait, my grip slipping while my wrapped hand sweats.

Who else is watching these eggs? I want to know. 

No answer comes, and I am still waiting, but that

was the end of the dream.  

Still, the same answer applied to his original question,

and it was still not enough, and I was still envious of the

way that someone could take it for granted that they

might follow such visions to whatever dream message

they were aiming for before the alarm shot them, 

execution-style, as we all lined up, backs against the concrete

wall and the relentless clock above us, holding 

for the start of the next day, our tentative beginnings and

the open-air eggs we were forever trying to protect.

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